Pot smoker turns to police to break addiction

Published: 16 Aug 2013 10:58 GMT+02:00

There are many different ways to try to give up a bad habit, but one French pot smoker was so desperate to give up his cannabis addiction he risked ending up behind bars by taking the drastic step of calling in the long arm of the law.

A 47-year-old cannabis addict from Rennes turned himself in to local police this week, handing over 1.6kg of hash and eight marijuana plants, in a drastic move to help him quit his 12-year habit.

According to local paper Ouest-France, the single man called up his local police station on Monday and told officers that he had been smoking joints for the last 12 years and wanted to quit.

Opening himself up to the risk of spending a spell behind bars, the pot addict invited the police to come to his house and confiscate all of his cannabis. Officers searched the property and seized 1.6kg of weed.

But the addict didn't stop there. He then drove the officers out to a plot of land near the gulf of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Landes where he was cultivating his own marijuana allotment. In all, eight plants were pulled up by police.

“He wanted to completely stop, it was causing him a lot of stress but he didn’t know how to do it. He had a lot of weed at his house and it was within easy reach, which made it hard to quit,” a policeman told the newspaper.

And the addict’s high-risk measure to give up pot appears to have paid off in one sense, with authorities agreeing not to charge him with any drug offences as a sign of goodwill for turning himself in.

“He won’t go to court, instead he will need to prove to the prosecutor that he has undergone therapy to help him quit smoking,” a policeman told Ouest France.

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